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First off, thank you. It's a great honour to hear that you consider me competition. ;)

I think fundamentally, you're right about what you say: a lot of what's necessary to succeed includes determination and an ability to get stuff done without constantly feeling slighted over every little thing. I don't really think requiring people to fit that mould is necessarily a great recipe for the long-term success of the industry, but it's a clear truth about many people who excel in the current environment.

The problem with stuff like your example about complaining about the album, though, is that it's not really that simple. In my experience in the academic environment, any one complaint would never go anywhere. Either there had to be a lot of complaints or, as in this case, some sort of general sense of malaise that meant that one complaint fit nicely into someone's confirmation bias. That general malaise is why a complaint from a male student won't get as much attention as one from a female one.

And I think that confirmation bias starts the real danger of the more frivolous-seeming complaints. It's not just that they're made, it's that in an organization that fundamentally doesn't know how to fix their problems, any small suggestion can quickly turn into a witch hunt or a supposed panacea for all the other problems. Something Must Be Done. Even if it's the wrong thing, it looks like We Take Issues Seriously.

It's very hard to complain responsibly and a skill I think more should learn, but it's perhaps even harder to react responsibly, and perhaps even more important that we learn to do so.